The Rest Is History - 93. Silicon Valley Part 1

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland are joined by tech pioneer Marc Andreessen. Has the internet been the most important force in modern history? In part one of this two part series they look at how the internet developed out of military technology, whether early developers knew they were changing the world, and why business initially built a ‘wall of scepticism’ around the possibilities of the World Wide Web. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. old silicon valley really was the wild west valleyites stole one another's product designs one another's wives and one another's employees they fought to the death all day and went out drinking together at night and deals that would one day be worth billions were often made with a handshake. That was Michael S. Malone in The Big Score, the billion-dollar story of Silicon Valley, which he wrote in 1985. Dominic, since 1985, Silicon Valley has gone from strength to strength. all may say that it's probably, in terms of today's economy, culture, civilization, probably the single most important place on the face of the planet.

Yeah, I think you can say it's probably the most important place in our lifetimes. So 1985 was the year that Max Zorin, the villain in A View to a Kill, tried to destroy Silicon Valley to give himself control over the world's silicon chip sort of industry and that was the first time I was ever going to the Bond film was was ever aware of Silicon Valley and obviously since then you know in our working lives the way we interact with I mean the fact that we're Tom we're doing this you know we do all our podcasts yes you know on zoom listeners may imagine that we're meeting up and doing this in a studio we're not yeah i've never i've never seen tom holland in the flesh yeah but no so this is a massive world historical phenomenon isn't it and absolutely worth discussing an industry podcast i think um yes complete well so we did an episode on california and we kind of touched on on the development of silicon valley there but i think

this is a subject that needs a much much closer closer focus. So in today's episode, we want to look at the history of Silicon Valley. Why did it, how did it begin? Why there? Where's it going? And we are hugely privileged to have had talking about this, one of the most influential figures in the development of the internet. So basically it's, it's like talking to Isambard, Kingdom Brunel about the industrial revolution. And our guest was Mark Andreessen. We talked to him a couple of weeks ago. Do you want to big him up?

I mean, Mark is a, Mark was, it was bizarre that we even got him to come on the podcast because he's far more too important to waste his time talking to people like us, but clearly not. So Mark Andreessen is best known because he basically is one of the founding fathers of the very first internet browser.

So that was something called Mosaic, which became Netscape. Lots of older listeners will remember having used it. But also he's then dabbled in almost every single aspect of, I mean, dabbled is the wrong word, been involved with almost every single aspect of the internet. And Facebook, he's on the board of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Skype, Airbnb. I think he was on the board of eBay. He was involved with PayPal. So in other words, basically everything you use on a daily basis has mark anderson's um fingerprints all over it but also also a great i mean a great thinker so not just an investor in the internet everything but but thinking about where it's going

i mean i guess you have to be you're not going to make money unless you're thinking about it but i mean he's kind of really interested in placing it in the the broadest historical context so it was it was slightly nerve-wracking wasn't it to meet to meet this titan of the internet via via zoom yeah basically our internet skills had to be on tip-top form absolutely but um bless him he he came on and was um well i think i mean listen listen to this episode first billionaire guest i think i don't think i don't think jonathan wilson's a billionaire i don't think ted valence is a billionaire but mark andrewson definitely was definitely um and so we kick things off by asking him the very obvious question would he agree with us that um the development of the internet is something of world

historical significance? Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me. Long time listener, first time caller. So as you read the quote from my friend, Michael Malone, who I've known for a long time, and I'm just a huge fan of, and I really recommend his book, The Big Spore, which just reissued by Stripe Press. I really recommend everybody read it. But as you read the quote, I actually remember he probably talks in the book. The bar that all the chip guys that he talks about in the 60s and 70s would go to every night was called the Wagon Wheel, which was an old Western bar in Mountain View. And when we opened up shop for our company Netscape in 1994 in Mountain View,

guess what bar we would go to at the end of every night? The Wagon Wheel. Wagon Wheel. So it's sitting in this sort of increasingly, you know, kind of run down, you know, quite literally like Old West themed bar. And so the, you know, the symbolism symbolism uh runs deep for sure well the fact it's the wagon wheel and that in a way california is the kind of the end of the journey isn't it uh i mean do you think is is silicon valley a kind of a continuation of the american frontier

the idea that you have to go forwards all the time yeah so i was born and i was i was i grew up in the rural midwest you know northern wisconsin and it was always this you know there was you know just as you know i didn't have any real sense of the sort of like deep history but like you know even as a kid it's like there's this like you know sort of romance uh you know to california and you know i think there has been in you know in america for like 150 years and um and so you know upon graduating you know, in America for like 150 years. And, and so, you know, upon graduating college, I, you know, I headed West following the, the sort of, you know, the, the original trail. And of course, you know, what happens if you head West in the U S it's, you know, you, you head West until you hit the ocean and then you stop. Yeah. You know, since we, we actually

did that build up, build out the territories, you know, earlier on. And so if you go as far as you can to the West and then stop, you end up in, you know, on the coast of California and you basically end up either in, you know, the dream factories of Los Angeles, or you end up in the dream factories of the San Francisco Bay area. And, and yeah, and, you know, sort of, as I've, as I started to appreciate the history ever since, including that I'm just the latest in the long line of people who have made this trek, you know, yeah, there is a, you know, there is a, you know, the, the frontier, the frontier spirit, I think you'd have to say like lasted longest in California, you know, yeah, there is a, you know, there is a, you know, the frontier, the frontier spirit, I think you'd have to say, like, lasted longest in California. You know, the two histories are fascinating.

So, you know, one is the Northern California of the California gold rush. And so you literally have the land where, you know, the streets are, you know, the streets are in theory paved with gold. It's a little bit harder to take the gold out, but it's there. And then, you know, in Southern California, you have this whole other thing, which I'm also fascinated by, which is sort of the, you know, they literally like dream the city into existence, right out of the desert. And that, you know, that's a whole, that's a whole saga of its own. But then, you know, the problem with California, you know, the problem with the American frontier is like, it did stop, you hit the edge of the coast, the physical frontier did stop, and you couldn't go any further. And so you know my my my sense is yeah what's basically been happening since since that you know since the literal development of the physical frontier

um is that we have been busily you know building basically new virtual frontiers and you know of course right of course you know the internet is a is the new virtual frontier of course you know the center of the development of the internet turned out to be um you know california and if you were sort of dating this revolution if we were if we want to place it in time as well as in place when do you think it it really started so the world war ii or before that or in the 70s when when should we when should we start our story yeah so there's another friend of mine actually uh his name is steve blank um and he's a longtime valley entrepreneur himself and actually has become quite a quite a historian um his in his in his in more recent years.

And he has this this talk you can find on YouTube, and I think it's called The Deep History of Silicon Valley. And he's he's sort of reconstructed, you know, kind of as far back as you can go. So the the typical way the story is told is that it starts basically with Hewlett Packard. So it starts with an engineering dean at Stanford named Fred Turman, who basically encouraged his, you know, young, young students, Bill and Dave, right, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard to start Hewlett Packard. You know, they actually start Hewlett Packard in the late 1930s. They then actually put the company on ice for seven years, because they go off to fight World War Two. And so they put it in suspended animation, go fight the war, they come back, they sort of, you know, dethought, you know, in 1945, and it becomes kind of the iconic Silicon Valley company.

So that's the typical history there. Steve argues there's actually a prehistory to it. And the prehistory actually is the development of military technology for between World War I and World War II. And so there were a series of basically advanced R&D labs in Northern California in the 1920s and 1930s that developed a lot of the key technologies around radar and around, you know, guidance systems

and around, you know, modern aircraft, control systems for aircraft. And in fact, there's still, you know, a significant engineering presence out here for Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors,

you know, this kind of barrier amidst the tech companies. And so he actually argues it actually predates that, actually the the actual engineering culture actually started with development of post-world war one you know his you know his argument basically was like world war one was like the first war where you know basically at least in america people were like you know okay you know technology is really going to matter like you know it's not

you know it's going to be you know aircraft are going to in particular play a huge role um and so they recruited the best and brightest to work out here so that that's the ultimate theory so you've got you've got the military and i suppose you'll say you've got hollywood to the south so you've got the idea of of creating dreams um stanford also is quite important isn't it you've got this incredible university at palo alto um and you need the brightest and the best to fuel this revolution right yeah there's a few really interesting things about stanford so you know stanford i think and you need the brightest and the best to fuel this revolution, right? Yeah, there's a few really interesting things about Stanford. So, you know, Stanford, I think generally, I think it's first of all, Stanford absolutely plays a central role.

It's 100 percent correct. And we could we could talk a length about that. I think there's a few interesting things about Stanford historically. You know, so one is I think, you know, it's fair to say that it's a university on par with the Ivy League, but it's technically not part of the Ivy League. And it was started much later than the universities in the Ivy League. It's a product of the 1880s, 1890s, right? So it's a product of the railroad boom and the, you know, the sort of quote unquote robber barons of that era. And you may know that the university itself was named Stanford because it's named after Leland Stanford Jr., who was the son of Leland Stanford, who was one of the main,

you know, people who built out railroads in the U.S. His son tragically died at the age of 16. And so he and his wife, you know, started the university to basically, you know, basically carry on his son's legacy, their son's legacy. And so, you know, it's a sort of a, the university is a product of kind of the second industrial revolution. You know, it also was, of course, geographically isolated, right? It wasn't on the East Coast with the rest of the Ivy League. And then the combination of, I think, being started later and not being on the East Coast meant both that it was more insecure, but also more open minded. And then, you know, you go forward not that far, right, between whatever, let's say it was founded in its modern form around 1890. You know, it was only about, you know, 40 years until this guy I mentioned, Fred Turman, had Bill and Dave,

you know, in his class there and encouraged them to start their first company. So, you know, sort of, you know, very quickly developed into what it is today. The most remarkable thing about Stanford both then and now compared to many other research universities is Stanford is very laissez-faire on allowing its both students and faculty to start companies based on the research work that they do when they're on campus. Most universities, including the one I went to, University of Illinois, are, you know, sort of intrinsically hostile to the idea that students or faculty would sort of, quote-unquote, take research off campus and turn it into a business for a variety of reasons. And Stanford has always been openly encouraging of that. And it's, you know, it's a model that's worked, you know,

obviously just incredibly well. And so it's, you know, you have to get Stanford credit, not just for the intellectual property of the Valley, but also sort of creating this ethos that, you know, knowledge exists to be able to use to build products and build businesses, which is, which is not normal. And Mark, stereotypically, the kind of people who came to California in the kind of gold rush and then, you know, in later kind of migrations, they came from the Midwest. They were kind of, you know, white Protestants from rural backgrounds seeking a new life.

Is that true, do you think, of the people who come West to sort of kickstart the computer revolution as well? You know, so it was true in the, the like 30s, 40s, 50s. And, you know, another historical figure that sort of matches the template, by the way, that you could trace is Philo Farnsworth, who was the, you know, sort of credited as sort of the inventor of color television.

And he, you know, he was another classic example of like basically the Midwest farm boy who came to San Francisco and, you know, created creative technology. You know, Bob Noyce is sort of in many ways, you know, sort of the godfather of Silicon Valley, along with, you know, Packard. Bob Noyce was the co-founder and CEO of Intel and, you know, was kind of the father figure kind of through the 50s and 60s. You know, he also he was an Iowa farm boy, right, you know, right along the lines of what you described. And so, you know, that that for sure is an archetype. And obviously, I'm another one of those, not to compare myself to these guys. But I'm, you know, I fit that archetype perfectly. I discovered to my enormous shock later, later on. But, you know,

really, then what happened was starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the phenomenon basically just like radically expanded. And in particular, in terms of global imports of talent. And so, you know, and in particular, like I think the first really big breakthrough there was what became known later on as the Hungarian mafia, which is you had these just you had this cluster of these just super geniuses from Hungary who escaped communism, in some cases, by the way, on foot in the 1950s and 1960s. And kind of uniformly had advanced engineering PhDs, incredibly brilliant people. And they were the other sort of the wasps plus the Hungarians that basically created Intel and created the modern tech industry. And Andy Grove, you know, Andy Grove is sort of, you know, one of the legends of American technology.

His, you know, his given name was Andras Grove. He was himself from Hungary. He famously, like, walked out of Hungary on foot, you know, dodging tanks in, I think, what was it, like, 1956. And so, you know, that, that was a, that was a dramatic turn. And then of course, you know, in the, in the decade since, you know, once immigration really, you know, kind of opened up in the, I guess the 1960s you know, now it's just like, it's an, it's an amazing kaleidoscope. Like it's like the United Nations, right.

You go, you go to the cafeteria of any of these big companies, you know, today, or you go to any venture capital firm and watch the entrepreneurs going through. And it's just like, it's just this amazing, you know, constellation of talent, you know, enormous, you know, kind of, you know, kind of clusters from, you know, India and China in particular. But, you know, tons of Russians, tons of Eastern Europeans, you know,

tons increasingly of South Americans, Central Americans, tons of, you know, Brits. I was about to say, he's not mentioning Brits, this is very, very worrying. Yeah, we need to stick up for Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. So here's one amazing thing. The French represent themselves very well. And so one of our rules of thumb in the valley out here in our inter-capital business is every French entrepreneur is fantastic.

They are just uniformly fantastic. And I think part of it is they're a product of the French educational system and so forth. or edge capital businesses, every French entrepreneur is fantastic. They are just uniformly fantastic. And I think part of it is, you know, they're a product of the French educational system and so forth. And then part of it is, of course, they made the decision to leave France. This is terrible news, though. Yeah, this one is completely counter to the ethos of this podcast. The Brits are doing quite well also.

Well, I'm relieved. We would encourage more. Feel free to send more of your best and brightest so so mark but by the 70s uh you've said this value it's originally santa clara valley right and covered in orange groves and orchards and things uh by the 70s they've all gone it's it's this massive hub of industry and i'm guessing that for silicon valley to become the silicon valley we have now you need to develop hardware and software and silicon valley does both and the hardware the key hardware is the development of the personal computer am i right about that well so we would argue that the key hardware was the chip um right so um hence the silicon yeah hence And this is why, you know, this is why it's still

called, like, you know, there are still chip companies in the Valley, you know, Intel's still here, of course, NVIDIA, you know, is probably the most innovative chip company in the world right now. And they're, you know, they're here, you know, they do all the graphics chips. So, you know, there's still a chip component. Of course, the chips aren't manufactured here. They used to be actually manufactured here. They really aren't manufactured here anymore. The fabs now exist in other places. It's too expensive to run them here, but that's still here. But it's not the central industry anymore. As you point out, software and internet broadly are the central industry now. But Silicon Valley has, of course, the iconic ring to it. But I think also, I think that name will stick

for a long time precisely because of the central importance of the hardware, and the central importance of the chip. You know, then I would also just, you know, connect your, your thing on the PC, like, you're right about the PC, you're right about the PC as follows, I think, which is, you know, the PC was the big breakthrough that sort of took computing to the masses, right? Because, you know, computers existed for, you know, 40 years in kind of modern form before the PC hit. And so that was the big breakthrough. The PC was directly enabled by the chip. And when I say the chip, I actually mean something very specific. I mean, what's called the integrated circuit or the microprocessor. And so the big breakthrough that Intel had that made Silicon Valley possible was basically taking a lot of different kinds of components

that would have made up a computer in like 1960. You know, many different, literally many different individual components and then literally putting them all together on a single piece of silicon, right? And then sort of the minute that happened, then all of a sudden the cost, you know, dropped dramatically to build a computer.

And then all of a sudden the PC became possible. You know, the PC itself, you know, dropped dramatically to build a computer. And then all of a sudden the PC became possible. You know, the PC itself, you know, the IBM PC was, you know, kind of assembled in, I think, in Florida by IBM at one of their labs. But, you know, it was basically an assembly of technologies basically clustered around the chip and then other technologies that were developed mostly in Silicon Valley. You know, Microsoft is, you know, Microsoft obviously provided the operating system for the PC.

Microsoft was a company based in Seattle, of course. We in Northern California consider Seattle to be a colony of the Valley. I think that people in Seattle disagree. But yeah, it was really that chip that was the breakthrough. of Apple and Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs coming together and founding Apple, putting out basically Apple I and then the Apple II. Is that a key moment in the history of Silicon Valley? I mean, that's how I think of it. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. So there were, and in fact, that's to complete the history, there were personal computers before the PC, right? So when we say PC, usually we now mean IBM PC or IBM compatible PC, you know, might we not consider

like a Microsoft Intel PC, like the reason Microsoft Intel are, you know, became the companies they did is because IBM selected them for the IBM PC, and then everybody else cloned the IBM PC architecture and created the, you know, we're called at the time PC clones, and that led to the, you know, and therefore companies today like Dell, you know, and so forth that build PCs. But before the IBM PC in 1982, and therefore companies today like Dell, you know, and so forth that build PCs. But before the IBM PC in 1982, and even before Microsoft and Intel got established to the roles that they then played in the industry, you know, the dominant roles they played, there were personal computers before the PC. And, you know, and there were, by the way, there were many different kinds of personal computers for the PC, right? There were, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of different basically consumer computers that you could buy in the late seventies, early eighties, you know, Radio Shack famously had a line, you know, that Atari, the video game company had a line,

Texas Instruments, the kind of legendary Texas tech company had a line of PCs. And then, and then, yeah, Apple was, you know, was, was, was iconic in that era. You know, Apple, well, there's, you know, there's a rabbit hole we could go down, which is that the Valley is sort of a hybrid of like a fifties, I don't know, like a car culture, you know, conservative, sort of cultural thread that kind of came out of, and then there's like a 1960s skippy counterculture thread that Steve Jobs

came out of and Apple kind of combined those two threads. And then Steve Wozniak was kind of, you know, the engineer that pulled it together. And so, and then those guys in the 1970s, there was this phenomenon. There was this thing in the 1970s famously called the Homebrew Computer Club, the HCC. And Homebrew Computer Club, you know,

quite literally meant people who were building their own computers at home, which was this weird fringe hobby thing in the 1970s. And that's what Wozniak is doing. I mean, he's the best exactly there was this crowd uh of uh basically nerds um uh you know they'd have day jobs at you know hp or whatever yeah the brilliant description from michael malone of was was the kid in high school no one knew the muscleless lump with glasses everyone thought was weird but you could

build down there anything electronic whereas steve jobs was the kind of he's the sales guy he's that he's a brilliant salesman isn't he steve jobs selling himself his brand his company and and a kind of the sense of apple as a is that right there at the beginning with apple um is that sense of apple as a as a as a lifestyle as a kind of dream of i mean that sort of sense of the frontier is very much part of apple isn't it you know made in california by apple yeah yeah exactly that that's right and then and then you know he also did you know kind of the same thing that kind of david geff did in music right at the sort of in the 60s and 70s also which is he also he kind of it it was that and then he also kind of packaged up the california ethos and to some extent the hippie ethos and sort of imbued the technology with that

ethos. Right. And so you, you kind of, you kind of got by buying an Apple computer, you kind of got to participate in the technological future, but also the cultural future. And he put a much more consciously cultural and counter-cultural kind of element on the whole thing. Like, you know, Intel, Intel was not counter-cultural, right? Like those guys were like, it was like, you know, white, you know, white shirts, you know, white short sleeve, red shirts, black thing like you know intel intel was not countercultural right like those guys were like it was like you know white you know white shirts you know white short-sleeved dress shirts black ties you know buzz cuts um you know and then apple was like hippie central um and um you know as part of the kind of the great part of the great packaging you know part of one of the great accomplishments of american industry in the 1960s 1970s was to pack package

up the hippie counterculture movement and sell it to you yeah i mean i think the story of apple would be a fantastic podcast in itself, isn't it? Because it has so many kind of associations. I think back to that California podcast we did, Tom, all about the sort of the California dream and stuff. And Apple absolutely incarnates that, doesn't it? But at the same time, there's a kind of nightmarish.

So do you remember that? I mean, nightmarish is a weird word, but do you remember that advert? I think it was 1984 during the Super Bowl. And it was this Orwellian. So someone smash a screen or something, and the future is going to belong to the Apple Mac. And it wasn't wrong, was it? It wasn't wrong.

But I think talking of commercial breaks, the perfect opportunity to go to a commercial break ourselves. The Super Bowl had Apple. Let's see what we've got. I think we've got much better ads than Apple's had. Let's find out. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

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That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. I'm sure you'll agree that our adverts are much better than Apple's Super Bowl advert from 1984. We're here with Mark Andreessen, who's basically talking us through the history of Silicon Valley and the internet. Mark, here's something that occurs to me. Almost everybody that we've talked about, I think almost exclusively so far, has been a man.

And there's always been this sort of, not controversy, but there's always been this debate about how much the internet and Silicon Valley are based on a specifically masculine culture is that right do you think that's fair yeah so i was gonna say yeah there's you know this gets to be a very complex topic and of course very controversial and also let me say like there were very significant women along the way um you know some of which i've actually gotten over the years who you know played really fundamental roles uh so there's a woman named sandy kurtzig

who was one of the creators of the software industry. There was Judy Estrin, another friend of mine, was one of the creators of the networking industry, you know, networking computers together. So, you know, for sure they existed. But yeah, for sure, the majority, you know, the majority were men. Yeah, look, there, you know, there's a component to it that's basically, you know, probably the exact same gender conversation you'd have in kind of any, you know, kind of any of these new fields over time. You know, but yeah, the other part is that you mentioned the nerd culture aspect to it, of any, you know, kind of any of these new fields over time. You know, but yeah, the other part is the, you mentioned this, the nerd culture aspect to it, which is, you know, we live, well, this is one of the things that's happened, right? We live in a world today where, you know, I don't know if nerds are cool, but like plenty of people have packaged

up nerd energy and figured out how to sell it. And then nerds have figured out how to start companies and build products and, you know, from time to time get rich on this stuff. And then nerds have figured out how to start companies and build products and, you know, from time to time, get rich on this stuff. And so, you know, there's a, you know, there's a status hierarchy and a sort of a success of life that, that sort of nerds have had sort of developed over the last 30 or 40 years that probably didn't exist before that. And so, yeah, there was, there was definitely a component to that. I think, I think, you you know i think the homebrew computer club would have been thrilled uh more women showed up to one of the meetings yeah well they may be not known what to say yes so so so we we have um we've got the pc we've got this kind of incredible concentration

of of first american and then global talent concentrated um south of the south of san francisco um and then you've got the internet so what is this what's the significance of the internet how does the internet take off and kind of that's a big question i know but but but i know you are the one man i can ask this question to and know that you won't be bullshitting when you answer well so the internet you know, so like a lot of the tech industry, so the internet starts with a story of basically military research, right? So the internet starts with a generation of research starting in the 1950s. And the literal origins, right, of it were nuclear command and control networks, right? Which is, you know, so you're the United States in 1950s, you're, you know, you're barking on the Cold War.

You've got these nuclear missiles and silos all over the country, you know, and on submarines and on aircraft and so forth. And you have to have a control system. But of course, the problem with nuclear command and control is what happens if there's a nuclear war and your command and control system gets knocked out. Right. And so then you can never, you know, your your your counterstrike ability is lost. And then, you know, the game theory says, you know, the minute that happens, the minute the other side knows they can take out your command and control system, then the game theory of nuclear war says they have to launch the first strike immediately because that's the chance. So this is like, you know, this is one of the biggest kind of highest tension issues in the military technology space. Then, so it's basically how do you build a network? How do you build a computer network that can withstand a nuclear war? Well, and so the key principle became how do you route around damage, right?

And so if one node of the network is taken out, you know, how can you still get a message from point A to point B? And that led to this idea of packet switching, which is the basis of the modern Internet. That then gets commercialized starting in the 1960s by a whole series of companies, including my friend Judy. And then, you know, subsequently, the federal government funds this project in the 1980s called the NSFNet, National Science Foundation. And they basically pay for the first kind of high-speed broadband internet in the way that we don't understand it. It links together a whole bunch of research universities. And then, you know, basically by the late 1980s,

you know, you have kind of the internet up and running in its modern form, but it's very contained to, you know, a relatively small set of users who are very technically sophisticated, you know, basically either at major research universities or military defense labs, or big companies of different kinds. And then, you know, things kind of rolled along for a while in that mode. And then, of course, you know, more famously, starting in the early 90s, you know, the internet became a consumer medium. And of course then of course, you know, more, more famously starting in the early nineties, you know, the internet became a consumer medium. And of course that was, you know, that was the big breakthrough kind of in 93, 94. And then, you know, the rest is more well-known. And you talked about, what was it? Eternal September? Eternal September. So,

so there was this phenomenon. So the internet in retrospect, so the internet between call it, you know, the internet in its kind of modern form exists, I call it from the early 80s to now. From the early 80s to the early 90s, there was this about 10-year window, like I said, where it was this pretty esoteric thing. It was very hard to actually get on the internet. Your PC that you bought off the shelf did not have internet connectivity built in. It didn't have any of the software or hardware that you needed to be on the internet. So just normal people at home were not on the internet in those days. And so what would happen, basically,

so it was this sort of esoteric thing. And then it was a very sort of implicitly selected group of users who were these extremely technically sophisticated users. They were almost all working professionals with advanced engineering degrees, very intellectual, very engineering, you know, very engineering focused engineering culture. You know, so the Internet, like in the 1980s, basically, for example, you know, there was like no spam. You know, there was no fraud. There was no trolling. There was no misinformation. There was no hate speech.

You know, it was like there was a utopian element to it, just sort of as a consequence of the people who could get on it. And then there was this phenomenon that these sort of internet old timers would know, which was the September phenomenon, which is basically every September, a new generation of, you know, undergrads or grad students or newly arrived employees at these places that had internet access would show up, right, you know, most famously, the undergrads, and they would be on the internet, and they would come kind of crashing into the internet, into the culture in September. And then it was sort of the job of the old time Internet people to kind of school the newbies on what they called netiquette. Right. Which was, you know, sort of proper behavior, you know, how to how to not be an asshole. And so it was sort of like every year is like, oh, you know, OK, another September, you know, pain in the butt.

It's been people who grouse about it. and then there was famously september 1993 september 1993 um that was the moment when america online aol which was a totally disconnected online service time for consumer online services with you know whatever at the time i don't know at the time it was probably i don't know five million users or something but that was a lot at the time. AOL in one stroke put all whatever 5 million of their kind of normal people, users, onto the internet, like all at once. And that became known as Eternal September because that's basically when the pass of Connecticut blew up. That's basically when that original culture blew up. And that's basically when, as we say now, the normies took over.

And this is also when you entered the story, right, Mark? Yeah, that's right. It also coincided. It coincided. AOL was like a fireburst, you know, whatever, because it was this sudden, it's this huge kind of bolus of users who hit all at once. But yeah, the other thing that happened was that was when we were doing the web browser, and that's around the time when we started Netscape, and that's the time basically when we were at Netscape, like able to package up all of the components you needed to get on the internet,

put them in a box, put it on the store shelf that you could just buy and get on the internet. And that's also when Microsoft and Apple and the PC companies started to build internet capabilities into the computers. And so that began the cascade that led to where we are today. So Eternal September is basically the, oh, my God, here they come, in perpetuity. Yeah, the orcs are at the gate. And then going back to you and the the browser so it's mosaic and then it's netscape and i suppose it's um it's an odd question because tom and i have done you know 80 whatever episodes about history but we've never done one with a kind of historical actor

in the podcast and i wonder were you conscious when you were, you know, launching Netscape, for example, that you were in effect making history, that millions upon millions of people were going to be using this to communicate, to change the way they talk to each other, they shopped, you know, to be able to change politics, it would change. I mean, did you have any sense of any of that? Or were you too absorbed in the kind of the technical process? Well, so first of all, you all, I'm from the Midwest. So even if I thought that, I could never admit that I thought that. So I would deny that all the way to my grave.

But no, so the thing that's lost now in the history, which was a big deal then, and this repeats itself over and over again. So I think about this a lot. This was not obvious. It was not obvious at all at that time that the internet was something that normal people would ever use, that there was ever any point to the normal person being on the internet, or that the normal person would ever be able to figure out how to use the internet, or that it would ever get to be easy to use or any of these things. And in fact, it was quite the opposite. There was this wall of skepticism from, you know, what you might broadly call the establishment. And, you know, by the establishment, I mean, it was a wall of skepticism from, you know, the big companies, from the big,

you know, telecom companies, from the big tech companies. You know, it was a wall of skepticism for sure from like, you know, Hollywood and the content industry, that they would ever put their content online. There was a wall of skepticism from the government that normal people would ever use this. I'll give you an example. One fun fact is commercial activity on the internet, which is to say anything involving money, which is to say anything including e-commerce, like the ability to buy something online, was technically illegal through 1993. Really? Goodness. It was technically not permitted by what were called the Internet Acceptable Use Policies,

the AUP, which was sort of the sort of agreement that you had to have to kind of get on the net at that time. And it was because, you know, the whole thing was up to that point was paid for by, you know, research, you know, federal research money. And so they just kind of took it for granted that obviously, it would be improper to use the results of federal research for commercial purposes. So, so this was this was not obvious. And in fact, there was this whole wave at the time, if you go back and read the press at the time, there was this whole wave that actually the future instead at the time was going to be what was called interactive television, or what became known as literally 500 channels. So the idea basically was

you'd be able to watch 500 channels of TV and then interact, they had what they called interactivity, which meant you could order a pizza with your remote control. And so it was there, this very, the sort of world, the sort of all the people in power at that time kind of had this view that there was just basically going to be, you know, that the role of the consumer, there's actually, right, the role of the consumer, the role of the individual is to be a couch potato, right, is to be a passive recipient, right, of content created by big companies to sit on the couch, absorb, you know, and by the way, there's some truth to this, right? You know, here we are with Netflix, you know, sit on the couch, absorb all this stuff. And then, you know, every once in a while, it's like to, you know, either buy a pizza, or maybe I'll drop off some toilet paper, stuff like that. This idea that individual users at scale were going to be

part of a truly interactive network where they were going to be able to contribute just as much as they consumed, right? And then, you know, you know, to, know, you know, you know, taking us up to the day, you know, some sort of massive impact on social media, the idea that, you know, you'd have all these people contributing their contributing their thoughts, whether you want to hear them or not like that. That was just viewed as like, just like, that was just crazy. Like people just were like that. That's just completely crazy talk. And so, so what we knew was that the internet worked for the people who were already on it and that it worked much better for those people than i think a lot of kind of normal people were understanding at that point and then i just here's here's what i never understood i never understood i mentioned the

internal september there was another side to the september phenomenon which is so i was an undergrad at the university of illinois the entire campus was wired for broadband it was on the internet you can see the whole thing um but the assumption was when you graduated you would stop using it right like you would just like stop using it you you would be on email until you graduated then you're off email right and you and i was like well that doesn't make any sense and so i i think the the honest answer is you could squint and you could kind of say okay you know like forget for a moment whether or not this will take among the broader population but like if it does like what would that mean and how big could this get?

And you could squint and you could see that because you can see those behaviors, but it was still a big conceptual leap that this would be mainstream. Mark, I mean, as, as someone who wasn't an engineer, who, who had no technical sophistication or ability whatsoever, I, for what it's worth, I remember in 1989, the autumn, I was at Oxford and there was a friend from California and he had one of those small Macs, you know, which I found revelatory. But the other thing that he showed me that I also remember being revelatory was a copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer, which had come out in 1984

and described something called cyberspace and described it, you know, this consensual hallucination that you went online and you experienced it. And I remember through the 90s, never buying into this idea that the internet was something like, you know, CB radio or something, because I had this image of it being the future that had actually been written in 1984 of all years. And I wonder, am I unusual in that? Or do you think the fact that the internet came with this sense, trailing clouds of science fiction with it, this sense that it was making the future was always there, even before the internet had actually kind of gone mainstream?

Yeah, that's right. I think that's right. I think, yeah, there was for sure a threat of science fiction. By the way, there was also a threat of kind of gone mainstream yeah that's right i think that's right i think you know yeah there was for sure a threat of science fiction by the way there was also a threat of kind of what you might call pop science where people were talking about these things like the you know there there had been this wave of enthusiasm in the 80s around what were called bbss which were kind of these kind of you know these dial-up services that individual users were offering other other services uh to other users um yeah there was there was you know various yeah there were various kinds of movies and TV shows through that era. There was a huge boom, huge interest in the early 80s. In America,

there were these TV shows like Knight Rider and Airwolf and so forth that really kind of glamorized this sort of really advanced computer technology. And so yeah, there was a lot of that. It was present in the culture. By the way, the most amazing thing about Neuromancer, which I highly recommend people read if they haven't, because it was very influential, and it was also influential on me, but William Gibson, the author, famously had not used a computer, refused to use a computer, and wrote that novel on a typewriter.

That's amazing. Maybe that means you can see more clearly if you're not, if you're viewing it as a pure outsider, which he was. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. So the Internet is up and running and then you start to get social media. So how big a change is that? Well, that's the network, isn't it?

I mean, you mentioned network already, the word a few times. And I think, I mean, I don't know if you agree, Mark, but is it a new, completely new kind of network, social media? Yeah. So the basic mechanics behind social media are very old. They actually, the total prehistory here that goes actually back to the 1950s, there was a computer system actually at the University of Illinois in the 1950s called PLATO, P-L-A-T-O. You guys will appreciate the name. And it was actually an interactive multi-user computer system in the 1950s that they built basically entirely by hand. You know, it was very crude by obviously our standards, but it had, you know, the minute they had it up and running, they had different, you know, kind of nodes that were together. And then the minute they did that, they had messaging happening between the nodes. And then they had, you know, multiplayer games, and they had you could put, you know,

status messages and kind of say, you know, I'm out of the office, or I'm, you know, available to chat, or I'm hungry, or whatever. And so that, you know, they have the rudiments right up front, you know, the 1960s, multi user computer computing kind of went a little bit more broad. Again, the first thing you did when you network computers together, even in a small environment, even like in an office environment was you started to have messaging and these kinds of, you know, kind of rudimentary social features. And then, you know, like I said, you had in the 80s, you had this boom, even before kind of the Internet would be in stream, you had this boom and what were called these bulletin board systems or BBSs where people would log in and, you know, have these, you know, they would have literally bulletin boards, they'd have forums, you know, and there would be everything from classified ads to, you know, dating applications to, you know, to, you know, to the ability to chat with other users. And then, you know, AOL, CompuSphere, Prodigy were these kind of commercialized BBSs. They had a lot of these capabilities.

And so, like, there was, you know, a lot of these, like, the general pattern that I've seen is, like, for any of these things that, like, break through to the mass market in tech, it's like there's always, like, a 40 or 50 year kind of back history. And sort of the ideas are being incubated. Social media, as we know it today, you know, kind of broke out. It actually started in the late nineties. You know, there was Friendster in around 2000, there was MySpace in around 2002. And then, you know, Facebook kind of hit the scene in 2004, 2005. You know, there were a couple of things that really kind of catalyzed the sort of massive social networking boom starting in the mid 2000s, you know, really with like Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter. I would say two big things is one is just that that happened to be when the consumer Internet actually kind of became mainstream. It was actually an interesting historical thing because, you know, the 90s were the quote unquote dot com boom.

But even most Americans were not on the Internet in the 1990s. Right. It was still a minority thing to even do. And it wasn't really until the mid 2000s that you started to have kind of a tip where a majority of the population actually got on the Internet. And that was also around the same time that broadband actually became a thing. And so there was just this kind of moment there where you kind of hit critical mass on the users. And then the other thing was, you know, the sort of other just gigantic, I think, innovation in retrospect, in particular around Facebook, which had a huge impact on things, was Mark Zuckerberg was the first internet entrepreneur who basically, you know, stood up with a straight face and said, people are going to use their real names

on the internet, right? And, right, which is really interesting because like basically before that and this is again kind of maybe lost history now but like before that the assumption was you could use the internet all day long but the one thing you would never do is use your real name right um you would always use a number or a guy or what is called a screen name or you know whatever a login id or something or a you know a pseudonym of some kind and you would basically do that well because because everybody knew, right?

Everybody's like, the internet's not the real world. Like, it's this other different thing. You know, it's this kind of weird thing. It's kind of nerdy and weird. By the way, you know. Dungeons and Dragons, kind of. Yeah. And then, by the way, it's the Wild West.

You know, and this was a term at the time. A lot of the press coverage in the 1990s were the internet is the wild West. And, you know, and at that point it was like, you know, there are criminals in the wild West, they're bad guys, you know, there's spam and there's, you know, fraud. And there was this whole, like one of the big things we had to get early, early in the, in the 90s people comfortable with was like basically the idea of ever

basically paying for anything online. And, and, and, you know, credit cards were kind of the way people paid for things online. And um you know the idea of putting your credit card number on the internet was like a very scary thing for a long time and so it's another one of these things where like you know you might get stolen your identity there's a whole rush of panic around identity theft or identity might get stolen and ruin your life if people find out who you were so so yeah it was it was like everybody put a mask on um and then you know it's one of these generational things where you know mark zuckerberg is you know was what uh he's probably what 15 it's probably 15 years younger than i am or something so um you know and he so he kind of

you know kind of came of age in the 90s as all this stuff was happening and to him it was just like oh it was just a different mentality it's like oh obviously this is going to be part of everyday life you know obviously this is going to be something that you do all the time um but just obviously you should represent yourself like it it should be you, like why wouldn't it be? And then that, you know, I think that was really the tipping point because at that point, then all of a sudden it was like, it was like the internet changed from like this land of weird, you know, all these, yeah, all these, you know, this, this sort of, I don't know, sort of weird, I don't know, low-end video game or something where you had all these kind of fake

people running around. All of a sudden it's like,, oh, my God, they're all my friends. Right? There they are. Right? And then that was the big breakthrough. So, Tom, I've never gone on Facebook. Are you on Facebook? I'm not on Facebook.

No. No. For the same reason I'm not on crack. But that's your reason for not playing Assassin's Creed. Exactly. I have a very addictive personality personality and i'm nervous for all these things but also in the in the case of facebook it is kind of um i suppose a kind of nervousness about um having uh all my most intimate details singing off to california to be processed

yeah but this is coming from a man who live tweets his walks i know i know but that but that's that's that's the terrible thing. That's why I know that I should never go on Facebook and why I always vowed that I would never do a podcast. So there you go. So I think that's probably the perfect note on which to bring this episode to an end and to set up the second episode with Marc Andreessen

where we will talk about social media, we'll talk about software eating the world and the kind of broader sense in which, how do we place this in the broadest context of history? How does this relate to printing and so on? And of course, to honour your commitment, your disregard for social media, we should be advertising it on Twitter, as we always do.

And I might even sign up to Facebook to do it. Very good. We'll see you next time for part two. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.